The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have previously been conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Data centers may be used to provide computing infrastructure by employing a number of computing resources and associated components, such as telecommunication equipment, networking equipment, storage systems, backup power supplies, environmental controls, and so forth. A data center may provide a variety of services (e.g., web applications, email services, and search engine services) for a number of customers simultaneously. To provide these services, the computing infrastructure of the data center may run various software applications and store business and operational data. The computing resources distributed throughout the data center may be physical machines and/or virtual machines running on a physical host.
Computing resources of a data center may transmit and receive data packets via a WAN. Physical switches and routers can be distributed throughout the WAN and configured to connect various network segments and route the data packets within the network environment. It may be desirable to optimize or otherwise transform the data packets transmitted and received via the WAN. Routing of the data packets for optimization may be performed by providing instructions to physical switches and routers to reroute the data packets to a data optimization virtual machine. However, involving reconfiguration of physical network components in data optimization may be costly and require complex coordination of various organizations and departments.